[Bf-taskforce25] Fwd: NLA system thoughts

[Matt Ebb]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nathan Vegdahl <nathanvegdahl at gmail.com>

I've been listening to the first bits of the winter camp stuff, and I
have a few thoughts regarding NLA.  Some of this may have been covered
later in parts that I haven't listened to yet, but I figured I'd give
my thoughts so far anyway:

1) The NLA editor should be, ideally, extremely similar to the
sequence editor.  There really isn't any reason to have the two
interfaces be particularly different, or to have the user interact
with them any differently.  Therefore: why not use the same UI code?
This unifies the user experience greatly, and reduces coding work both
now and in the future.  Only very small changes would need to be made
to accommodate NLA editing.

2) IMO, ideally by default there is a single scene-level action that
*all* animation goes into.  Then, if someone is just animating
normally (i.e. no NLA) they don't have to know anything about NLA, and
they don't get confused by action references popping up all over the
place in the Graph Editor and Dopesheet.

3) The user should have to *explicitly* create new actions.  Blender
should *never* *ever* implicitly create actions without explicit user
intervention telling it to do so. (The default scene action is the
only exception.)

4) Similarly to #3, the user should typically have to *explicitly*
switch the action they are currently working on.  Blender should
*almost* never implicitly switch actions, except where it really makes
sense to do so. (I can't think of any cases where it would make sense,
but I have a gut feeling there might be some.)

5)  The typical workflow for working with actions should be to
create/switch to the action you want to work on, and start animating
as you normally do.  All keys that you add (regardless whether they
are for objects, materials, modifiers...) go into the currently active
action.  And all displays/editors reflect the current action.

6) The action that you are currently working on should be obviously
reflected in the UI somewhere.

More complex features can be layered on top of these 6 points (such as
actions within actions), but unless someone can convince me otherwise,
I think it's important that this be the basic way that NLA works in
Blender.

I hope my explanations made sense.  If any of you need clarification,
do not hesitate to ask.

--Nathan